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WASHINGTON (2/6/14)--The Credit Union National Association's "#DontTaxTuesday" Twitter and Facebook campaigns walked away with a Grassroots Innovation Award from the Public Affairs Council Wednesday.

"We could not be happier with the success of credit union's social media advocacy," said Richard Gose, senior vice president of Political Affairs at CUNA. "We owe much of our success to the dedication of credit union members, who willingly engage in advocating for their credit unions."

The Grassroots Innovation awards are given out annually at the Public Affairs Council's National
Grassroots Conference in Florida. The awards recognize the nation's best grassroots programs and campaigns in the categories of Corporate Innovation, Association Innovation and Social Media Innovation

On July 23 and Sept. 10 last year, CUNA and state credit union league advocacy used social media to encouraged credit unions, credit union members and other credit union advocates to contact state and federal lawmakers directly with the unified message of "Don't Tax My Credit Union." Some of the tweets incorporated videos. Below are just three of the kinds of messages sent to legislators:

For the first "Don't Tax Tuesday" in July over 5,200 messages were posted with the #DontTaxMyCU hashtag with roughly 2,000 being sent directly to member of Congress.

For the second "Don't Tax Tuesday" in September CUNA worked to develop a Twitter and Facebook plug-in on the "Don't Tax" site (see resource link) that would allow advocates to simply enter in their address and directly Tweet their legislators or post messages on Facebook supporting the "Don't Tax My Credit Union" campaign. The second "Don't Tax Tuesday" boasted nearly 8,000 tweets with the CUNA Advocacy hashtags including 5,000 directly tagging members of Congress.

Overall, since the "Don't Tax My Credit Union" campaign began in May 2013, it has garnered more than 1.3 million direct messages to the U.S. Congress.